It seems great at first: A custom-software solution built in-house that solves the exact problems your organization faces. As application development has become easier with the facilitation of new technologies, and talent has become more widely available, why wouldn’t a company wish to create their own home-grown software solution? After all, early success of these custom applications make them incredibly appealing.
The rub is in the long-term outlook. Ongoing expenses, maintenance, and shifting priorities often mean home-grown solutions become outdated quickly. Even with proper planning, there is an inherent risk that the system will not scale correctly and become a hindrance to the company in years following.
Carmax, one of the largest used-car retailers in the United States experienced this situation when their home-grown CDR solution became too costly to maintain. Understanding the importance voice communication plays in the success of their business, the retailer incorporated CDR reporting into their business intelligence software to help them guide their operations, sales and marketing departments. Their Avaya platform centralized calling data from 52 sites then streamed their data file along with 110 separate site-location data files through their database repository before parsing the information into reports for their analysts to review. At first this process seemed to be sufficient, but as time passed, more and more custom scripts were developed to build logic around identifying location numbers, match channels, and identify trunk ID’s.
Soon CarMax’s internal CDR collection system had become a labyrinth of work-arounds that made the data circumspect and the cost of sustaining the system had become substantial. The system also had a few shortcomings.
CarMax was unable to report on multiple legs of a call with their solution and had “…built in metrics around what data counted as an actual call attempt” in an effort to create additional sequel logic. John Vaughan, Principle Telecommunications Engineer for Carmax, described that analysts were soon questioning the usefulness of the system and found it “…very challenging to weed out “bad” or un-needed data…” The current system was also unable to sequence the call activities for many calls that did not include location logic, nor trace calls that entered their voicemail system. Carmax had developed a script to determine the daily count of the times the voicemail menu was selected by callers, but were unable to match these voicemail counts to the callers themselves.
XT Telemanagement includes cradle-to-grave reports: After investigating several viable solutions, Carmax decided that XT’s enterprise-level CDR reporting was the solution for the job. XT directly captures all the inbound, outbound, and internal call data available from the Avaya Aura platform and is able to capture streams from multiple sites and versions then matches the data via UCID and other data markers to separate the data by location, extension, department and even call stage.
XT was built for customers like Carmax and has multi-site capacity to centralize reporting among many call network streams and deconstruct them into a single database to provide enterprise-wide reporting capabilities. XT is also able to provide information to Carmax on the cradle-to-grave journey of each caller, including which callers entered their Intuity Audix voicemail system; a wish-list item that had gone unanswered for years with their home-grown system.
Transitioning from their incumbent system to XT was kicked off with 10,000 extensions for their first phase of the project, then added an additional 10,000 extensions later in the year. Carmax now captures CDR in real-time using XT and uses an ODBC connection to their centralized data repository so their business intelligence software and analysts can create and automate reporting for all of their different applications. Phase three consists of adding an additional 15,000 extensions in the next year.
The XT solution now receives and stores "...all the raw PBX data for our analyst to data mine… The cost-savings is in the internal FTE time it would have taken to develop this on our own and the long term operational expense of keeping our existing solution supporting.” To pinpoint marketing campaign effectiveness, analysts can further research call volume graphs with XT’s hotspot map to visually see how call density is affected when ads are running in certain areas of the county, and identify trends. Vaughan concluded, “…[XT is] a big win for us!".
The cost-saving is in the internal FTE it would have taken to develop this on our own..."
John Vaughan, Principle Telecommunications Engineer for Carmax
Carmax switched from their old system to XT with an initial deployment of 10,000 extensions, followed by another 10,000 extensions later that year. With XT, Carmax can access CDR in real-time and connect it to their central data warehouse, where they can use their business intelligence tools and analysts to generate and automate reports for various applications. The last phase involved adding the final 15,000 extensions across 162 sites.
”The cost-savings is in the internal FTE time it would have taken to develop this on our own and the long term operational expense of keeping our existing solution supported,” Vaughn described. “ [XT is] a big win for us!"
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